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Man Who Didn’t Dream

The brain’s likely centre of dreaming was located when a 33 year old man in Israel was examined for causes of a sleep disorder. The man, known as Y. H. was routinely tested at the Technion Sleep Laboratory in Haifa, and was found to have almost no observable REM sleep. Usually the rapid eye – REM – period of sleep accounts for about 25 percent of our night’s rest, and it is during REM sleep that we dream. A scan on Y. H’s brain showed that a piece of shrapnel which had entered his brain during 1971, had passed through the pons. It had already been suggested that it was the pons which originated nerve signals producing REM sleep, but Y. H. provided the first real evidence of this theory.